Capodimonte, Italy
1618
Even now, so many decades after, the thought of what so nearly happened in Switzerland sometimes catches Catherine unawares. She will be kneeling in the garden, weeding among the herbs, all the rich and grassy scents of them filling her nostrils and her own vague humming in her ears; and suddenly she will remember that Antoinette was nearly taken from them in the streets of Basel, and her humming will cease and she will suddenly be inhaling the travel-oiled smell of her child’s head, and her arms will ache to snatch at her, to keep her close and safely tethered.
When she recalls herself to the garden, to the sun and the bees and the dirt under her fingernails, she also recalls that, although Antoinette was not taken from them that day in Switzerland—although they had another handful of years with her in the sunburned gardens of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, where she chirped and chuckled to the penned-up animal marvels who lived near enough to their new home that she could, and did, easily toss scraps of her dinner to them—she was taken from them eventually, just the same.
This morning, Henri leaves on one of his trips to Rome. He goes occasionally in all their steads, a sort of envoy to both the duke and to his brother the cardinal; a human show of gratitude that they consented to release them all to Capodimonte so many years ago. He kisses his wife on the cheek, and she nods stiffly; then he turns to Madeleine and Catherine, who have also come to wish him safely on his way. His embraces are warm but quick, as if he cannot mount his horse fast enough; as if the thronged, sun-hot Roman streets call out to him.
Catherine holds him a second longer than he wishes. “Be certain to give the other Henri my greetings,” she says, their little joke for years; Henri’s portrait, commissioned by the cardinal nearly twenty years ago, hangs in the Palazzo Farnese.
Henri is not so impatient that he does not play his part; the tight fist of her heart loosens a little.
“I think you mean Enrico,” he says, grinning. Henri is the only one among them who stubbornly continues to correct anyone who does not call him by the French variation of his name; and yet, poor boy—poor man—his portrait hangs under the name he hates, and he is noted as Enrico in every register.
The painter, she remembers, showed her son like a true wild man, bare but for an odd little cape made of skins, knotted across his chest. Henri’s body was, strangely, painted as if it were another man’s, the hair that covered it so light and sparse it was almost impossible to see. But the face was Henri’s own dear face, the light shining over its curling hair, his soft mouth and wide ears faithfully rendered. He was painted not alone, but with dogs, monkeys, and two other men from the cardinal’s household: a dwarf named Amon, bent nearly in half under the weight of a huge parrot, and Pietro Matto, the court madman. If she remembers very hard, Catherine can see them all clearly; can hear, too, Amon’s gaiety at the lavish feasts the cardinal and duke liked to host in the gardens, and Pietro Matto’s odd lumbering gait and his laugh, which came from his mouth in short bursts of hilarity, like a child’s.
Henri’s skin cape was meant, he explained to Catherine and Petrus, when they stood before the unveiled painting, to evoke thoughts of his Guanche ancestors, who wore similar garments called tamarcos.
“My idea,” Henri had said. “You know how His Eminence loves anything barbaric.”
Catherine remembers how her breastbone seemed to crack over her heart—at his words; and at the image before her of her son reclined like a pagan god from some forgotten land, framed in gilt like a nobleman.
“How handsome you are,” she had said at last; and her voice cracked, too.
But Petrus touched his own sleeve, as if it abraded him; put a hand to the stiff ruff about his throat; and turned away.
Henri releases Catherine now; turns and mounts. “I will be certain to give Enrico your regards,” he says from his horse, still grinning down at her. He raises a hand in farewell, chucks to the animal, and they set forth down the road.
In the months since Petrus left her, she has found herself sinking into the soft warm muck of her own memories more and more often. Sometimes she wonders whether she might someday, like so many old women, sink so far that they close over her head, leaving her senses deadened to everything else.
Later that afternoon, Madeleine joins her on a slow, ambling walk about the village. Catherine’s daughter has been more solicitous of her since their father’s death, as if she senses that her mother might easily slip away from them as well. She couples their arms like links in a chain, skirts intimately brushing. Catherine lets her talk—of Paola’s pregnancy, of Henri’s latest business endeavor—drift lazy as smoke about her head. Their feet carry them toward the lake, where the water shows green and blue as a peacock’s tail. The shoreline here is all big rocks, speckled like birds’ eggs, with the softness of sand beckoning farther down the way. All that Catherine can think about is walking here with Petrus when they first arrived, how his face went gentle as the late afternoon sun, his mouth wide as a child’s. He did not speak at all, only looked. But later he would tell her that the deep color of the lake; the high jut of the cliffs above it, coming straight up from the water, steep and stunning; and the green of the hills all around—all this reminded him of the place he had lost, the island of his boyhood. That he felt, for a moment, as if he had come home.